[javadoodle]

Sketchbook tomfoolery. I started drawing Cardassians on my latest sketchbook page, and they just kept multiplying.

…I seem to have officially run out of page.

Mostly my own character designs, apart from Dukat and Damar boxed up in the top-left, who are now conveniently filling what was a whole lot of blank space before. Plus, hey, they’re fun to draw too.

[theshimmyspot]

Definitely a nerd problem. (Whoo!) These guys were fun. May have to do more. And something complete/tidied up next time.

you might fill with laughter until you break - 1

[tinsnip]

For bmouse, who likes it when nice things happen to Garak.

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you might fill with laughter until you break - 1

For bmouse, who likes it when nice things happen to Garak.

the taste of fruit

[tinsnip]

Short and sweet and heavy on the Kardasi. Not explicit, but you probably shouldn’t read it at work. I hope you like it!

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the taste of fruit

Short and sweet and heavy on the Kardasi. Not explicit, but you probably shouldn’t read it at work. I hope you like it!

Oh, fuck.

Do we know the name of Cardassia’s sun? Like, its actual name, not Cardassia Three or whatevs?

themanfromnantucket asked:

With all this fuss (good fuss, though) about Leonard Nemoy being the universal Trekkie grandfather, I figured it would be appropriate to ask you how to say the familial term in Cardassian.

Oooh, fun! So I consulted with Vyc, and the conversation went as follows:

tinsnip:

Well, I think it probably depends on whose!
If you’re dealing with a family with a mother and father, then we’d have mother’s mother and father’s mother, father’s mother and father’s father. Odds are they all live with you anyway, if they’re still alive, so you can’t just say “Grandpa,” it’s going to confuse everybody.
adik is mother and yadik is father.
a’adik is mother’s mother; ya’adik is mother’s father.
a’yadik is father’s mother; ya’yadik is father’s father.
Those are the formal names. You can also abbreviate. ad’ is mommy, yad’ is daddy, a’ad’ is mommy’s mommy, ya’ad’ is mommy’s daddy, a’yad’ is daddy’s mommy, ya’yad’ is daddy’s daddy.
There are also pet names, of course, like ts-ts (because that’s one of the first noises most little reptile babies can make, so of course the grandparents co-opt it), or hUr (a sort of humming, purring coo; a soothing sort of noise). A little puff of air might be a thing too: ffuh.

Vyc:

I absolutely love that it matters in Kardasi whose grandfather you’re talking about. With both family and territory being huge things for Cardassians, that makes perfect sense.
The only place I see a problem is when trying to apply the rules to families with two parents of the same gender. How do you specify whose grandfather you’re talking about when technically both would be termed ya’adik? While we could go the route of one being ya’adik and the other ya’ad’, I feel as though Cardassians would have words to discriminate between the two regardless. What would those words be? What would they be based on? Status of one parent versus another? But what happens if they’re both, say, hibalek class? I don’t know! :D;

tinsnip:

Yes! I thought of this too, re: same-sexed parents, and I figure that this is where you’ll have “grandfather” and “gramps,” kind of thing? Or “nana” and “pop pop?”
Re: status: oooo, that’s complicated. Okay. Well, that might determine who’s “grandfather” and who’s “pop-pop”. High status wins and gets more respect. If you’re both the same class, older wins. If you’re both the same age, perhaps names do start coming into play, and we get ya’ad’ Rugal and ya’ad’ Chemut. But that’d be uncommon, weird enough that other people would be like, wow, what are the odds? And you’d be like, dude, I know.

And there was unanimity, and much smiling~!

So, Leonard Nimoy is everybody’s grandfather! But since we can’t give him a maternal or paternal aspect, let’s just call him ts-ts and be done with it!

[feltelures]

Hello, everyone! tinsnip has encouraged me to share a project I’ve been working on this month, so, well, here it is: a version of written Cardassian that corresponds to the linguistic rules of the Cardassian language built by tinsnip (and by me, a bit), using the Cardassian font as a base.

Not to make this too long, but as a bit of background, there have been three versions of the Cardassian language that people have put together that I’m aware of: tinsnip’s (which uses Timothy Miller’s version as a base), Greig Isles’, and Esther Schrager’s Simplified Varagasi (more on that in a later post). However, there’s been only one attempt that I know of to put together a written language to match the spoken one—Greig Isles’. (There’s a Cardassian font, but it basically is a letter-to-letter matchup with Latin script […mostly] and has nothing to do with the Cardassian language.) Unfortunately, while it looks as though he put a huge amount of work into building the written Cardassian language, its rules make it essentially useless for the version tinsnip has created.

So, this is where I stepped in—with full permission, of course. I wanted to take the preexisting characters of the Cardassian font and make them correspond to the linguistic rules of tinsnip’s Cardassian language so that any word could be written as well as spoken.

I had a few goals that I tried to keep in mind as I worked:

1) I wanted to maintain Greig Isles’ Cardassian numbering system. This meant that any parts of the Cardassian font where characters had been flipped and mirrored to make the numbers had to be changed.

2) I wanted there to be logic behind the characters I chose to represent each sound, and behind the relationship between the written Cardassian language and its romanization. So while I often left alone anything that didn’t overlap with a number, if I did have to change it, I tried to make similar sounds visually similar as well. (For example, since uppercase X is basically 0 mirrored and flipped and there’s no character assigned to lowercase x in the font, I made it visually similar to k…as far as I could, anyway.)

3) I wanted the language to be accessible (from the point of view of an English-speaker, which is where all my expertise lies). While of course Cardassian is an alien language and thus is likely to be very different from anything spoken on Earth, I wanted the language to be usable by fans without too much trouble. Speaking personally, I’m already trying to learn hundreds of kanji. I don’t need to devote hours to learning how to write in space lizard language. :|

For a few more notes and a usage guide, check below the Read More. I would highly recommend having the pronunciation guide from tinsnip’s language file open as you read along—unless, of course, you’re already familiar with Cardassian pronunciation rules.

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[tinsnip]

Tumblies, this is allll Vyc. Please direct all delight to her, as she is perfection embodied in flesh.

Like… I would never have even tried to do this without her. And she just kind of tilted her head, went oooohkay, and built a written language.

I cannot praise her highly enough. And I can’t wait to write in Kardasi~!

[libraryofalexandria]

Meditations on “The Crimson Shadow”

A Garak/Cardassia mix for The Crimson Shadow by Una McCormack.

Can also be read as Garak/Parmak or Garak/Bashir or both if that makes you happy. Or alternatively a post-canon Cardassia mix with literary references which probably make little sense if you haven’t read the book.

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